Unified Communications

Today's work environment can be very different from what our parents experienced. The business environment is more competitive, with an unrelenting pressure to be more efficient, to react quickly, and to make important decisions instantly. Efficiencies can be gained by reducing costs, which in turn increases profit, but significant gains can also be made by investing in the business infrastructure so that productivity increases dramatically. Increased productivity means more opportunities to profit from a newfound competitive edge. This is known as Return on Investment, or ROI. The goal is to maximize the ROI—for every dollar spent, businesses want to see more dollars earned, or at least fewer dollars wasted.

One area in which businesses have found ways to improve their ROI is in their communications. The evolution of communications from traditional telephony, through cell phones, to smart phones and email, and now to Unified Communications, has created opportunities for businesses to access information and get it to workers instantly. Unified Communications puts voice, data, and video on a converged single network. This makes monitoring, administering, and maintaining the network simpler and more cost effective than if three separate systems existed. Unified Communications also puts powerful applications with information-distribution features right where they are needed. Workers today can be almost anywhere and can carry out meaningful or even critical tasks anywhere they can get a connection to the converged network.

The next significant feature of a Unified Communications system is that it is easy to scale, adding more users, more locations, and even more features. Because the Cisco Unified Communications system is a distributed collection of devices, functions, and features that are linked by common protocols, adding a new component is much simpler, and integration of the new component's capabilities and features can appear seamless to the people who use the system.

The components required to create and use such a system are numerous and complex. Cisco has taken significant steps to develop, document, release, and support the various components as an integrated system. The next section examines the components of a Unified Communications system and introduces the devices and applications that make up the system.


Key Components of the Unified Communications Architechture

• Infrastructure Layer: This layer refers to the network itself, made up of connected switches, routers, and voice gateways. This is the converged network that carries data, voice, and video between users on the system.

• Call-Processing Layer: This layer manages the signaling of voice and video calls. When a user picks up the phone and dials a number, the call processing agent determines how to route the call, instructs the phones to play dial tone or to ring, and records the details of the call for future analysis. The call agent carries out many other functions; it can be considered the equivalent of a traditional PBX system, but with many more features.

• Applications Layer: This layer features elements such as voice mail, call-center applications, billing systems, timecard or training systems, and customer resource management applications—to name just some of the many applications that can integrate with, draw from, or otherwise complement the Unified Communications systems. Because the Unified Communications systems are distributed (meaning not constrained to one box or even one location), the applications can be hosted almost anywhere, given appropriate connectivity.

• Endpoint Layer: This layer includes the parts of the system that the users see, hear, or touch. This includes Cisco Unified IP Phones, PCs with software phones, video terminals, or other applications that send and receive information from the Unified Communications system.